The Artist Behind Lorde’s Album Cover Wanted To Capture Youth in All Its Glory

Yesterday Lorde debuted “Green Light,” the first single from her upcoming album Melodrama. Produced by Lena Dunham’s boyfriend Jack Antonoff, the song and its accompanying music video discuss the 20-year-old singer’s “first major heartbreak,” and point to where Lorde is headed after her debut, Pure Heroine, shattered records and made headlines in 2013. Sure, there were rumors of a break up between her and her boyfriend, James Lowe, last year, after they disappeared from each other’s Instagrams. But nothing’s certain in the whims of the young and very famous. So the next best clue to the future of Lorde is her album cover, a painting by 31-year-old Brooklyn-based artist Sam McKinniss. The way McKinniss describes it, the album art was the converging of two like minds and “simpatico spirits.” In modern day parlance: Lorde tracked down his address through a mutual friend and fan-girled him over email.

“It was really nice,” McKinniss said. “She told me she liked my work.” So they met over coffee last October. “Turns out, we were both going through really intense creative experiences.” Lorde was busy in a New York studio sculpting what she described in a Facebook post as the “best lyrics of my life,” while McKinniss prepared for his solo show Egyptian Violet at Team Gallery in Manhattan. “She’s been looking at my work a lot; she can relate to it.”

On November 7, Lorde celebrated her 20th birthday (and the end of her teen years) with a Facebook post. “Writing Pure Heroine was my way of enshrining our teenage glory,” the singer wrote. “Putting it up in lights forever so that part of me never dies, and this record—well, this one is about what comes next. I want nothing more than to spill my guts right now about the whole thing—I want you to see the album cover, pour over the lyrics...touch the merch, experience the live show. I can hardly stop myself from typing out the name. I just need to keep working a while longer to make it as good as it can be.” On Twitter, she furthered that Melodrama examines the “last two wild, fluorescent years” of her teenage years with a (slightly) more experienced eye. This, in a sense, is also the goal of McKinniss’s work, which pulls from a “catalogue of popular imagery from the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s that are stuck in my subconscious.”

McKinniss freely appropriates imagery from a range of subjects—references range from Disney’s Flipper to that Lil’ Kim VMA ensemble, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman—as long as there is an “emotional intelligence” that he can communicate through playing with the images. Before rising in the art world, the closest he came to “coolness” was consuming the pop culture imagery. “High school for me in Connecticut was a lot of waiting around until I could move to a big city and hang out with cool people,” he says.

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This feeling of waiting for a future that seems to take so long to arrive in an angst-filled present was exactly what Lorde wanted the cover of Melodrama to say. McKinniss stressed the creative venture was “all her,” namely “like, where her head was at while she was making music, in the studio” while still communicating youth, and like Sam’s show, “the colorful restless of youth and how being young can feel like you have a superpower.”

Under Lorde’s guidance, they linked over several days at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn to shoot source photos for the painting. (He prefers to paint in an empty studio, without a live model.) “She had really distinct ideas of what time of day, where it would exist, and the time, and the colors, [all of] which we talked about a lot.”

They settled on dusk, an easily-read symbol for the hazy time as one enters adulthood. And however famous its subject, the painting’s star is its palette. In the flat strokes that Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin might have used to design a cover of Tiger Beat magazine, neon ignites smoky tones in a range of shades that mirror the second the sky falls to night. Lorde places her dark gaze left-of-center, where she seems to wait on the outskirts, looking for a chance to unleash her potential.

Sam is reluctant to share more about the upcoming album, which does not yet have a release date. He hasn’t even heard every song. “I was a fan before I met Lorde, but even more so now...she is really smart and mature. And I’m really impressed by the way she approaches her craft.” Plus, he feels that as a pop icon he connects with, he would have painted her eventually. And, like Lorde, there’s a sense that he’s still catching his breath in the whirlwind of attention. “All I ever wanted to do growing up was go to the studio to paint and hang out with cool people that I’m in love with. And, uh, trade jokes and ideas and that’s kind of what my life looks like now. Not everyday—but there are days when I wake up in my New York apartment and make my cup of coffee and I leave for my studio. Sure, there’s a lot of toil and struggle that goes into that, but I’m doing exactly what I want, which is a pretty teenage thing to do.”